Designing Questionnaires To Obtain Opinions In Assessing Program Performances

In accrediting a program, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) assesses the program using a list of nine Criteria. Opinions of external constituents of a program are important assessments required by ABET. The major constituents are alumni of a program and their employers. The Educational Benchmarking Inc. (EBI) is one business organization which has a set of questionnaires to collect opinions of external constituents. Theses questionnaires are enormous in size often repelling the respondents to volunteer their time. Besides, many questions in that survey are irrelevant to program objectives and are devoid of the very essence of the assessment requirements. As a result, it is better to design opinion survey questionnaires based on own assessment requirements. The psychology of the respondents is also one important factor to consider. In the process of development of questionnaires, sacrificing some less important questions turns out to be a good idea too. Any questionnaire more than one page in length is likely to be abandoned by the respondents. The first attempt to obtain responses from external constituencies using the EBI questionnaires ended up with not a single response from employers in 2004. To address this problem, emphasis was made to develop precise instruments (questionnaire) to obtain opinions from the external constituents. Various elements were considered in designing the instruments. One major focus was to make sure which minimum information is needed to fulfill the objectives of the program objectives. This strategy resulted in adequate responses which strengthened the self-study report for ABET visit of Fall 2004. This paper discusses the development of the survey instruments for gathering opinions of external constituents for program objective assessment required in closing the loop in the process of continuous improvement.